"A Night to Remember" was only his second book. Having a penchant for history from childhood, he attended Princeton University where he majored in history, and later graduated from Yale Law School, but ultimately joined a New York-based advertising agency. He was evidently aware of the sinking of the Titanic on that voyage, as he stated that even at age ten, he tried to imagine "such a huge thing" sinking. He reported that his interest in all things Titanic was initially sparked when traveling on the great liner's sister ship, the Olympic, as a boy. Walter Lord's personal history is also a fascinating one. It is indeed the story of a single night, long ago, but not so far in the distant past that it is incomprehensible to modern-day readers. It creates a story that readers can follow, in excruciating detail, concerning the events of that tragic night. It was really the first attempt to piece together the fractured mosaic fragments of survivor testimony, both as recorded in the wake of the Congressional hearings, and from the recollections of people, some decades after the tragedy, to provide a running narrative of what happened that night. This extraordinary book is still the pre-emminent account of the demise of the Titanic, even over a century after the event occurred.
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